In a surprising move, Apple has announced today that it will adopt the RCS (Rich Communication Services) messaging standard. The feature will launch via a software update “later next year” and bring a wide range of iMessage-style features to messaging between iPhone and Android users.

Apple’s decision comes amid pressure from regulators and competitors like Google and Samsung. It also comes as RCS has continued to develop and become a more mature platform than it once was.

  • @extant
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    651 year ago

    I just want to point out that this announcement comes after Nothing phone company announced they partnered with a company that will bridge the two protocols so apple was about to lose their ability to force android images and videos to look like a potato so iPhone users wouldn’t want to leave the apple ecosystem.

    This just exactly like when apple decided they were going to be champions of privacy by improving the security on their phones, which coincidentally happened right after a company called cellebrite started selling a product that would allow police to bypass passcodes and fingerprints to access a users data which previously could only be unlocked by the police department paying a fee for each time to unlock a phone.

    They will always default to being shitty like any other company treating their users like the enemy until they can’t and then they spin it in their favor.

    • Ghostalmedia
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      261 year ago

      There are several of these solutions in the wild now. Basically, the phone tunnels into MacOS VM that sends the message through actual iMessage.

      Kind of janky, but it works.

      • Mac
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        61 year ago

        Beeper is sick! Would highly recommend. Or if you’re feeling frisky, self hosting the bridge in a docker container is possible. The container is a kvm osx vm.

        • @[email protected]
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          31 year ago

          Does beeper have a docker? I tried to install it last week, only saw an ansible notebook or something like that, broke my nginx and didn’t even work

          I want to reverse proxy to it, not have it take total control of my vps or dedicate a vps to it

          • Mac
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            31 year ago

            If you have a matrix server, then yes the mautrix-imessage bridge has a docker container. Beeper itself you can’t really self host as it’s their matrix server you live on (I haven’t checked out the beeper-selfhosted git yet).

            I’m pretty sure the playbook is just docker under the hood on a service user instead of your normal user. There’s a way to run the playbook with docker as well (memory is fuzzy on that).

    • @[email protected]
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      111 year ago

      Nothing is literally nothing, Apple could care less about them.

      Nothing’s solution is basically getting you to send your messages to them, and they’ll send it through a Mac logged into your Apple ID hence achieving the “blue bubble” lol. Hugely insecure, hacky solution and hardly groundbreaking.

    • @thrawn
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      81 year ago

      Seems more likely to be Apple getting ahead of incoming legislation than a small phone company’s announcement. Companies like Apple don’t make huge changes within a couple days of nearly unknown (to the general market) companies doing something that might slightly affect them.

      Regulations work, and in this case, it doesn’t look like competition played any role. Apple only makes changes like this when forced to by regulators or, in the case of privacy, when it’s marketable. Capitalistic self regulating is almost a myth with them— they wouldn’t even stop selling those butterfly keyboards until their self imposed refresh timeline allowed for it.

      • @extant
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        01 year ago

        I’ve no doubt it’s more than one thing that is driving this, but my point was they are only now agreeing because they have to and not because they want to. This company has literally taken away their customers ability to receive quality media from their friends with the sole intent to pressure people into getting their product so they belong. I know it’s hyperbolic to say, but it’s basically using teens to bully each other into buying something. Someone had to pitch this idea to a room full of people and all those people thought wow this is a great idea, think about how fucked up that is.

    • [email protected]
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      51 year ago

      Nothing doesn’t have anything real - it’s a Mac in the cloud with some janky scripting puppeting Messages.app. They haven’t figured out how to plug in at a protocol level or anything.

    • 𝕽𝖔𝖔𝖙𝖎𝖊𝖘𝖙
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      1 year ago

      Beeper, and the open-source Matrix bridges it uses have been around for a while now, including the iMessage bridge.

      Definitely a better choice than Nothing’s “we don’t believe in open source” sketchware